Rand's Web Page
Feed My Starving Children
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On March 13 and 14 the entire town of Perham gathered to address the problem of starving children in the world. The idea for the project started with Miss Perham (Karlie Miller) and the local ministerium. Miss Perham set hunger as her platform and decided to address it in a big way. She wanted the entire town of Perham to work together to feed the hungry. She enlisted the help of our Pastor (Phil Holtan) and the ministerium. They set an initial goal of raising $17,000 to provide 125,000 meals. It quickly became apparent that all the churches and civic organizations would get behind the project and make it much larger. |
| On Friday, every class of students from the entire school district came in to pack meals. In the evening and all of Saturday, the adults got their turn. Each shift started with an orientation. We learned about the extent of the problem of starvation (not just hunger) in the world. We saw a video of how the meals we would be packing would be distributed to the poorest of the world. The organization Feed My Starving Children is based out of the Twin Cities where they have three permanent packing sites. They also have mobile sites that come to places like Perham (usually much bigger cities). |
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The food recipe was determined by Cargill food scientists. It had to be safe for starving people to eat (not too much fat or sugar). It had to be universally recognized as food with common knowledge of how to prepare it and it had to be vegetarian (over half the world's population is vegetarian). The process involved blending a mix of chicken flavoring with vitamins, dried vegetables, soy and rice in proper proportion. |
| The package would then be sealed and packed in boxes. Each package contained six meals. |
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Our church had 14 teams. Some of us participated on teams outside of the church as well. My team was made up of clinic and hospital employees. Here they are measuring out each of the ingredients and putting them in the funnel that fills the package. |
| Our team also put the labels on the packages. |
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After the packages were filled, they were sealed. |
| Here is most of our team. Others (including me) were warehouse workers. This meant that we had the job of restocking the rice, soy and other ingredients. |
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We also gathered up the filled boxes (with 36 packages each), sealed them and stacked them on pallets. They were loaded onto semi-truck trailers for shipment. |
| We gathered at the end of each shift to hear how much we had packed. By the end of the weekend we had packed 435,000 meals. This was enough to feed 1192 children for a year! Our town of 3000 people had raised over $45,000 to pay for the supplies. Essentially every school child and more people than actually live in Perham got involved. |
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